Orijin

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Obamacare cost to be 20% less than forecast, budget office says

President
Barack Obama's health care law will cost about 20 percent less over the next
decade than originally projected, the Congressional Budget Office reported
Monday, in part because lower-than-expected health care inflation has led to
smaller premiums.

So
far, the number of uninsured Americans has dropped by about 12 million. By the
end of 2016, 24 million fewer Americans will lack insurance, the non-partisan budget office forecast.

Excluding
immigrants in the country illegally, who are not eligible for coverage under
the law, only about 8 percent of Americans under age 65 will lack insurance by
the time Obama leaves office, the budget office's latest report on the law
estimates.

Of
the Americans who will remain uninsured once enrolment has fully ramped up,
the budget office estimates that about 30 percent will be people in the U.S.
without legal authorization. An additional 10 percent will be people who are
too poor to buy insurance on the exchanges, but who live in states that have
not expanded Medicaid. The remaining 60 percent will be people who choose to
not buy insurance or enrol in Medicaid.

Those
forecasts assume that Obamacare remains in its current state for the rest of
the president's tenure, a projection that could be significantly upset by the
Supreme Court this year. The high court is set to rule by June on a challenge
to the law's grant of subsidies to insurance consumers in many states.

The
budget office, noting that its estimates of the law's costs have dropped
repeatedly, said the smaller price tag was "attributable to many
factors." Two of the largest were "the slowdown in the growth of
health care costs" and the Supreme Court's decision in 2012 to allow
states to opt out of expanding the Medicaid program for the poor.

About
half the states have so far declined to expand Medicaid to all impoverished
adults, as the law allows. Because the federal government pays the cost of that
expansion, the states that have declined have held down federal spending.
Several of those states are reconsidering, however, and the budget office
projects that additional states will decide to expand Medicaid over the next
several years.

Overall,
the budget office projects that insuring people under Obamacare will cost
roughly $1.35 trillion over the next decade. Most of that money goes to
subsidizing the cost of insurance for working-class and middle-class families
and to the expanded Medicaid program.

The
report suggests that projected price tag could drop again later this year. An
estimate of future premiums, currently in its "early stages," seems
to suggest lower costs, the report said.

For
this year, the budget office estimates that about 12 million Americans will buy
insurance on the new online markets, known as exchanges, which the law created.
The total on the exchanges will rise to 21 million in 2016, the report
forecast.

Enrollment
in Medicaid and the related Children's Health Insurance Program is higher by 8
million as a result of the new law, the budget office estimates, and that
figure is expected to rise to 16 million by 2016.

Those
increases in coverage will be partially offset by a reduction in the number of
Americans receiving coverage at work, which the budget office expects to see in
future years, as well as some smaller shifts in the insurance market. The
budget office expects that between 9 million and 10 million fewer Americans
will have coverage through their workplaces by 2018.